Snagit 12

Packed with useful screen-capture features. New video-trimming tool. Full range of borders and effects. Uploads to YouTube, Google Drive. Can capture drop-down menus and other Windows features that many rival programs can't.

Journalists, bloggers, meme creators, forum posters, and anyone else who works or plays online will eventually need a screen-capture app. TechSmith's Snagit, now in version 12, is the app for the job. Snagit (also available for Mac) combines a new video-trimming tool, traditional image- and video- capture, image import/export capabilities, and much more into one slick package. Snagit snags (ha!) our Editors' Choice award for its flexibility, power, and ease of use, despite being significantly pricier than competitors like the capable and wallet-friendly Ashampoo Snap 7.

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Start SnaggingWhen you launch Snagit, the app displays a mini control that peeks out from the top edge of your display. It sports a big red button for taking a screenshot and smaller buttons for various settings options. The text-scraping option is no longer available.

The big red screen-capture button is only one of many possible ways to start a screen capture; by default, Snagit also lets you press the PrtSc key (or any other keyboard shortcut that you prefer) to start a capture.

If you've tried other screen-capture apps in the past, you know that it isn't easy to find an app that can capture drop-down lists and other Windows features that tend to disappear when you press a key. Snagit's incredibly useful timed countdown feature alleviates the problem by letting you capture almost anything on screen. This should be a feature in all image capture apps.

Snagit lets you easily apply special effects to an image (like grayscale, text, arrows, and borders) without aspiring to be a super-tool (and a super-complicated tool, at that) like Adobe Illustrator. Its video-recording feature lets you include an audio track from either a microphone or Windows' own audio output–for example, from an MP3 recording on disk or a YouTube video. TechSmith's Fuse Android and iOS apps (both free) let you export images from your phone or tablet to a desktop running Snagit if the devices are on the same Wi-Fi network—and it works well.

Profiling CapturesSnagit comes with a small set of capture "profiles" that determine exactly what gets captured when you take a screen shot. The default All-in-One profile displays a brightly-colored pair of cross-hairs on the screen that you can either drag to select the part of the screen you want or hover over a window border to capture its whole area. For the first option, the selection is captured when you release the mouse button. If the selection area is an automatically selected window, you simply tap the left mouse button to take the screenshot. Ashampoo Snap 7, by contrast, requires you to click the highlighted section after you trace an outline to capture the image.

Other profiles include one that inserts the screen capture into Word with a border, or records a video and sends it to ScreenCast. Similar profiles can be downloaded from inside the app itself, so you can use a profile that sends a screen capture to Twitter or Facebook, or posts a video capture to YouTube. You can create custom profiles, too, by selecting outputs and effects and saving the setting.

Image Editing, New Video EditingBy default, a captured image open in Snagit's Editor, and is saved in Snagit's image library. One great thing about Snagit's image saving is that any screenshot you snag will forever be accessible from the program cache, even if you don't explicitly save it.

From the editor, you can save images and videos to disk in any standard format, including JPG, BMP, PDF, and Flash. Snap 7 doesn't let you save images as a Flash file. You can even add hotspots that act as hyperlinks if you save your capture as MHTML, PDF, SWF, or Snagit's own SNAG format. One essential feature for anyone making screenshots of Internet applications is the Blur tool, which comes in very handy when you want to mask elements in an image—obscuring phone numbers in screens that are going to be publically shared, for example.

Google Drive integration lets you upload images to a dedicated folder without leaving the app—very cool. Unfortunately, other popular cloud storage services like Box, Dropbox, and OneBox aren't supported. Images can be exported to Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.

New to version 12 is a simple video editing feature. Previously, you needed a separate video editor if you wanted to trim a video; now you can do that from within the app. Trimming a video is as simple as setting two points and clicking the Cut icon. Trimming is the extent of Snagit's video editing chops, but it works well (if you want to add titles or such, you'll need an external video editor). Captured video can be shared to Camtasia, ScreenCast, or YouTube.

Earlier SnagIt versions recorded video in AVI format, but, starting with version 11, Snagit adopted the MPEG-4 format. You can preview captured videos in Snagit's video editor, and capture individual frames from a video.

Snagit assigns some keystrokes for its own features, such as Shift-F9 and Shift-F10 to start and stop video capture. If you use those keys in any other applications—for example, Microsoft Word uses Shift-F10 as the equivalent of a right-mouse-click—you may be puzzled when those keystrokes seem to stop working the way you expect. The solution is to go to SnagIt's Tools menu and change or disable these keystrokes in the app's Program Preferences dialog.

Small IssuesOur only serious complaint with SnagIt 12 is that it still lacks a revert feature that would let you undo all your modifications to a saved image at once, without repeatedly pressing Ctrl-Z or clicking the Undo icon for each change you've made. You can close an image without saving, and then reopen it, but that's more trouble than using a revert feature. Also, in many apps a revert can be undone if you change your mind. Closing with saving is more of nuclear option.

Beats the CompetitionDespite lacking a revert function, Snagit is beautifully-designed, reliable, and efficient app that does just about everything a screen-capture app should do. Rival screen-capture products like Ashampoo Snap 7 effectively perform basic screen-capture functions, but none matches SnagIt's flexibility and power. Of course, if you're using Windows, you can find a built-in Snipping Tool for fast-and-easy screen captures, but that won't be enough for most serious screen-shotters. Snagit remains our favorite screen-capture app on Windows, and once again is our Editors' Choice.

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